At today’s special meeting of the Ad Hoc River Committee, its chair, Councilperson Ed Reyes, offered these choice words:

“Whole habitats are just dying. It’s no longer just the coral reefs. There are whole classes of wildlife, of fish. You know what’s amazing — depressing — but you can just see the veins of this pollution going into the ocean. They showed the East Coast and the West Coast, and L.A. was a major artery — our trash.

So I think the key here is to oscillate from these bigger picture issues to the core role of our departments of our city, and how we spend our monies. There’s connectivity there, dialogue…

OK, maybe the city’s not here to save the ocean, but if we take care of our own backyard and deal with these issues incrementally, it does have a positive effect. I want to keep pulling that back into the discussion, and to the core values of the city.”

See you on the river, Jim Burns